The Last Post on the Bugle

In the United States, the word “rhetoric” has developed an entourage of negative connotations. The term “campaign rhetoric”, for example, has become entirely synonymous with triangulation. The word has been infused with emptiness by overly cautious politicians who showed uncharacteristic prowess when pillaging the term of any meaning. No mainstream public official of late seems to have considered that brutal intellectual honesty could be an effective political tool, until Barack Obama strolled onto a Philadelphia stage this Tuesday morning.

Barack Obama’s speech on race, for the first time, gave serious, indisputable weight to his claim that he might indeed be the candidate of real change. His speech suggested that when he says he wants to “change the language of Washington” he doesn’t mean introducing the Spanish version of the national anthem. If his speech is any indication, he means relative intellectual honesty, as an effective counterweight to the ignorance and fear of the opposition.

What remains to be seen now is whether American voters will warm to this new honesty, or even recognize it. After years of being fed hollow speeches by vague opportunistists from both parties, Obama’s speech might seem somewhat alien to them; adding to the widespread fear that the honourable Senator is some kind of dangerous foreign element. Wittgenstein once said, “if a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand it.” Americans have been living in an echo chamber of conventional wisdom for quite some time now. They have learned the language of the inhospitable media jungle, and intellectual honesty has become something of an unfamiliar tongue. One hopes that these men and women, who have been conditioned to barbarity, will still have the ability to recognize a true Mandarin in their midst.

As someone, who generally believes that average Americans are more savvy, pragmatic and tolerant, than liberal pessimists and conservative optimists would like to think, I am hopeful. One thing is clear: if Obama does continue his brave pursuit of honest, unashamedly progressive argument and wins in November, American politics will be forever changed (maybe forever is a tad dramatic: until the next intellectual recession, just to be safe). An Obama victory, fuelled by the audacity to address real problems openly, would shatter, pixilate, conventional wisdom about the tight constraints of electability. The democratic party would finally be emboldened to follow their better instincts, and backwardness would no longer work to the advantage of the right. The inevitable shift to the center come election year would be abolished; the political center, as we now know it, would be disbanded and outsourced to some barbarous state in Eastern Europe. Maybe Yglesias wasn’t entirely wrong when he suggested that Obama could turn out to be an American Trudeau.

Watching the fascist apparatchiks of right wing punditry squirm after the speech, it seemed that they know exactly whats at stake. Since their success depends entirely on the continued intellectual sluggishness of the American people, a radical change of tide, a new sort of consciousness threatens there very existence. On Tuesday, one could see the hamster wheels in their heads overheating. Clearly, they all found it quite difficult to smear something so transparent. After begrudgingly complimenting parts of the speech, they all stooped to hapless attacks.

1) “he didn’t distance himself from Wright enough” – Bill O’Reilly

2) “let us remind you of some of the things Rev. Wright has said” – Hannity

3) “he threw his grandmother under the bus.” – Scarborough and Hannity

“He threw his grandmother under the bus,” is by far my favourite of these arguments. Arguments 1, and 2 (not sure if 2 qualifies as an argument), are signs of helplessness, death cries from men whose faces are starting to look like declining empires. Number 3 is interesting, because its so telling.

“My white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me.” Barack Obama

Obama was showing compassion for the prejudiced; he was suggesting that the demonization of prejudice leads to its denial, ultimately leaving it untreated. He was advocating dealing openly with the prejudices we all hold, and he exposed his grandmother for an altogether honourable cause. By suggesting that this amounted to “throwing his grandmother under the bus”, both Scarborough and Hannity seemed to be saying that Obama was doing his grandmother a profound disservice by explaining the contradiction she represented. In doing so, they were essentially advocating that such deep-seated feelings be kept under wraps. In Hannity’s case this comes as no surprise; his hatred is so deeply-rooted in his entire existence, that to purge him of it might well mean to kill him.

Obama’s speech will, at first, prove more effective in wooing the democratic establishment and the media than the general populace (especially all those angry lower-middle-class whites). But, unlike wealth under Reagan, these positive impressions will most definitely trickle down, albeit slowly. Rev. Wright’s tirades have already successfully been drowned out by Obama’s soft voice of clarity on most mainstream networks. Superdelegates were most certainly watching, and judging by the positive responses the speech is garnering from many staunch Clinton supporters, it is difficult to go entirely untouched. This speech locked up the nomination.